Linked List: January 2009

Saturday, 31 January 2009

After I linked to Brent Simmons’s description of his new homegrown Ruby-based content management system, a few DF readers recommended Webby:

Webby is a fantastic little website management system. It would be called a content management system if it were a bigger kid. But, it’s just a runt with a special knack for transforming text. And that’s really all it does — manages the legwork of turning text into something else, an ASCII Alchemist if you will.

Friday, 30 January 2009

I love stories like this. The system Brent just built for himself sounds a lot like the system I was this close to building for myself when I started Daring Fireball: a template-based system that runs locally on the Mac and pushes static HTML pages to a remote server. I went with Movable Type instead not so much because I liked it better than the home-grown system I had in my head, but because it was finally starting to dawn on me that my programming projects always take a lot longer to complete than I think they will.

There have been many times since 2002 that I’ve regretted not building my own publishing system from scratch. But, now that I can post and edit to Movable Type from my iPhone, I have a major reason to be happy that I have a system that doesn’t run on my Mac.

Speaking of everybody’s favorite WebKit plug-in, here’s how it works. This should help you understand how it fails on some sites, and maybe aid you in contributing to its development.

Hosey has contributed some cool stuff to ClickToFlash. One thing I’m noticing about GitHub is that it seems to be the first open source community through which multiple forks of the same project feed back to one another.

As you may know, Apple added Flickr uploading to iPhoto ‘09. As you may guess, I was a little perturbed at this since I pay my mortgage by selling, er, a Flickr upload plugin for iPhoto. I acquired my copy of iLife ‘09 yesterday and decided to dive deep on how Apple have implemented Flickr integration in iPhoto ‘09. Here are the results of my investigation.

He admits he has a stake in it, but he makes a strong case that iPhoto’s built-in Flickr integration leaves a lot to be desired.

My thanks to Zumobi for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Zumobi is a mobile development house offering a bunch of apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, including “Inside Xbox 360” and “REI Ski and Snow Report” (both of which are free) and “Pro Football” (which is currently on sale for $2 for this weekend’s Super Bowl).

So, the 0.113 ppm of mercury purportedly in HFCS makes even less sense to panic over. Even more, it’s biologically implausible for 0.000113 part per million that might be digested to be dangerous. We’d have to eat impossible quantities to get enough to worry about.

Still sounds like bad news to me, but it only seems fair to link to the opposing argument.

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

Of the 137 billion estimated total searches performed in the U.S. last year, 85 billion were done on Google. What’s even more impressive is that nearly 90 percent of all the growth in search volume was also captured by Google. Most of that growth came from increasing the number of searches per person, rather than bringing more people to Google.

Wait, but Sarah Lacy told me just last week that Google has been dethroned because no one stays on top for more than four years and because Twitter is growing.

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

We put in a call to Apple to find out the reason why, but unless you’re new to this whole scene you won’t exactly be flabbergasted to hear that the company was about as communicative as your average sullen teenager. The company’s approach appears to be pretending that the system was never announced in the first place — you won’t find any notice of it on Apple’s site, save for the plaintive cries of users wondering what happened to it.

Steven Johnson, guest-blogging at Boing Boing, on how he writes his books:

My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)

Bad times are hard on overweight companies and over-leveraged start-ups, but can be kind to freelancers and small agencies. Clients who once had money to burn and big agencies to help them burn it suddenly consider the quality of work more important than the marquee value of the business card. Fancy offices and ten people at every meeting are out. A close relationship with an individual or small team that listens is in.

A lot of it is cool in a sci-fi sort of way, but none of this stuff was even close to practical at the time. One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was put an end to “concept” designs, and focus the entire company on making actual, real products. (Via Steven Sande.)

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Nice before/after example from Beau Colburn, with footage from a Flip Mino HD. And here’s an example from Neven Mrgan. Update: And an example from Jason Snell here.

What I’ve found is that iMovie won’t apply any stabilization at all to a clip that contains any portions which are too shaky to stabilize. Like, say, a single clip where you shoot pointing north for a few seconds, then quickly whip the camera around to point south for another few seconds. But if you break that clip up into two separate clips — editing out the blurry “whipping around” frames — iMovie will then stabilize the separate clips. iMovie helpfully indicates the “too shaky” portions of a clip with red squiggly lines. Here’s the relevant portion from iMovie ’09’s help:

A red squiggly line underlines any video in the Project Browser or Event Browser that was too shaky to stabilize. To play a clip stabilized in a project, you must remove any parts underlined with a red squiggly line.

But I’ve found that iMovie will stabilize some clips which contain the red squiggles, if the squiggled segments are short.

Very broad language — taken at face value, Apple effectively owns the IP rights to multi-touch in the U.S. This sucks.

To be clear, my beef is with the U.S. patent system in that it allows something like this. Given the state of software patent law in the U.S., I don’t blame Apple or any other company for pursuing the broadest patent claims they can. And just because they hold an apparently broad patent doesn’t mean they’re going to use it as a weapon. Here’s to hoping they don’t.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottle, if I had to,” Updike told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

So it appears the original project page at Google Code for ClickToFlash is no longer accessible, for reasons unknown. That’s OK, though, because the project was open source, and it’s already been forked and slightly improved. Wolf Rentzsch is now maintaining a forked version hosted at GitHub, and it now supports Option-clicking to add the current domain to a whitelist so that Flash content will subsequently load automatically. You can add domains to the whitelist manually with the following command-line invocation:

I saw this last week and wasn’t sure if it was going to be around for long, but it’s still up, so maybe Apple doesn’t mind. You still have to use iTunes to actually buy or download apps, so effectively it’s just an affiliate site, but it more or less tries to reproduce the layout and appearance of the official App Store. I can’t figure out who’s responsible for this.

BSD-licensed open source WebKit browser plugin that prevents Flash content from loading automatically. Instead, each Flash element appears as a simple gradient; to load it, you click it. Works in both Safari and WebKit nightly builds, and, in my testing, significantly decreases the amount of CPU used when you have a slew of open windows and tabs. And it’s a legitimate browser plugin that goes in ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/, not a dirty input manager hack. I can’t remember the last time a piece of software made me this happy.

During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration.

Sunday, 25 January 2009

Unfortunately, the usability of Android’s browser is limited by a few factors: among them the lack of multitouch functionality. There’s no pinch-and-zoom as there is on the iPhone; instead, when you scroll, you get a translucent bar at the bottom of the screen with zoom in and zoom out buttons, along with another button that gives you a full-screen view of the page. In that mode, you can drag a loupe-like viewer around; when you release your finger, the view will zoom in on that section of the page.

It works okay, but it’s somewhat kludgy and the whole experience feels like surfing the web with a periscope. Having to move your finger down to hit a specific button to zoom in or out is a pain: when you want to zoom in on a particular point of a page (say, a small link), it’s annoying to have to move your finger back and forth between the zooming and panning around the screen to find the part you want to see.

The only natural interface for arbitrary zooming on a touchscreen handheld device is multi-touch pinching. There’s no conceptual abstraction between the gesture and the result. It’s the sort of broad, general idea that should not be patentable but unfortunately is. Palm seems ready to use it in the Pre, though.

John Resig explains how a captcha solver written entirely in JavaScript by Shaun Friedle works. Good illustration of how programming is often just about breaking hard problems into a series of smaller, simpler problems. It’s extremely clever code. (Via Andy Baio.)

Friday, 23 January 2009

Intego, makers of VirusBarrier and other security software for the Macintosh, issued a security alert for Mac users on Thursday, advising them about the existence of a new Trojan Horse, which they’ve named OSX.Trojan.iServices.A. This new Trojan Horse can be found in pirated copies of Apple’s iWork ’09 application suite, which has been downloaded over 20,000 times, according to Intego’s numbers.

My thanks to Kindling for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Kindling is a web-based “idea management and collaboration tool”. The basic idea is that it acts as a forum for an organization or team to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. The voting system brings popular ideas to the attention of everyone. Their web site has an excellent introductory/screencast video — really makes it clear how Kindling works and what it’s for. They also have a demo installation you can try for yourself, and you get a 30-day free trial when you sign up.

This segment of a report titled “Can Anyone Replace Steve Jobs at Apple?” by Rupert Neate and James Quinn that appeared last week in the U.K. Telegraph caught my eye:

Apple insiders say Mr Cook — who also took the helm while Mr Jobs
took time off for treatment for a rare type of pancreatic cancer
in 2004 — has been effectively “running Apple for a long time”.

Michael Janes, who runs Apple’s online store, said: “Steve is the
face of the company and very involved with product development but
Tim is the guy who takes all those designs and turns it into a big
pile of cash for the company.”

First, I never heard of Michael Janes before. Second, if he currently “runs Apple’s online store”, why on earth would he be talking to the press about Apple senior management? When is the last time anyone at Apple has been quoted by name in a news story regarding how Apple operates?

It ends up Janes does not “run Apple’s online store”. Jennifer Bailey does, as Apple’s vice president of the Apple online store. Michael Janes did run the Apple online store — emphasis on the past tense — about six years ago.

While companies such as Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection, MSN Mobile locks tracks to the mobile handset they are downloaded to.

And:

Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK: “At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC. We don’t have that functionality available.”

Methinks whoever is behind this ought to be on the Microsoft layoff list.

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found
computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft
software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the
West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on
online videos.

Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit
mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to
ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential
Records Act.

We’re watching that space, but right now from our point-of-view,
those products are based on hardware that’s much less powerful
than what we think that customers want, software quality that is
not good, cramped keyboards, small displays. So we don’t think
people are going to be pleased with those products, but we’ll see.
We are watching that space. About 3% of PC industry was in this
netbook kind of category so it’s a category we watch. We’ve got
some ideas here. But right now, we think the products are inferior
and will not provide [an] experience to customers that they’re happy
with.

Sounds to me like Apple’s about as oblivious to the netbook opportunity as they were to the smartphone opportunity around, say, 2006.

Chen adds:

Apple would be ignoring trends seen in its own earnings report if
it refused to offer a device in the netbook category. In
Wednesday’s earnings call, Apple announced it sold a record number
of iPods in the quarter: 22.7 million. With iPods priced no higher
than $400, it’s clear the netbook price range is attractive to
consumers.

Apple sells a lot of copies of iWork, so maybe they should make a $79 netbook, too.

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

Though Apple didn’t provide sales figures for its Apple TV set-top box, Cook said sales were up three times what they were during the year-ago quarter, citing the addition of movie rentals to the iTunes Store. The company still describes the Apple TV, which lets you watch digital content on your television set, as a hobby, but Cook noted, “We think there’s something there.”

Double here, triple there, and next thing you know they’re going to have something. You wait and see.

Despite a raft load of nifty new features, Apple’s new Mac notebooks will have a hard time moving off store shelves during the economic crisis, industry analysts say.

“There will be a lot of people looking at a lot of stuff at the Apple Store, and they’ll probably come out with [iPod] nanos or shuffles,” said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies. “That’s what people are going to feel like they’re going to afford this year.”

As a reminder, Apple’s laptop sales for the quarter were up 34 percent year-over-year.

Roger Kay doesn’t say outright foolish things the way, say, Rob Enderle does. But his record as an analyst regarding Apple is simply atrocious. He seemingly has no comprehension of what Apple really does, and why people buy Apple products.

Apple has now sold over 17 million iPhones to date, and almost 11 million in the last six months alone. Good time to recall Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s prediction regarding Apple’s prospects in the mobile phone business, a few weeks prior to the iPhone introduction:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Apple sold 2,524,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing nine percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold a record 22,727,000 iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 4,363,000, representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

“Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history — surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

I expected the iPod Touch to be the sleeper hit, but according to Apple’s data summary (PDF), while iPod unit sales are up 3% over last year, iPod revenue is down 16%.

Terrific collection of photographs, as usual. I like the one inside Bush’s helicopter as he departs Washington. It’s sort of like being President fades away rather than changes in an instant. It’s like he’s still part-President there.

On the 16th and 17th of April 2009 The Mac Developer Network with Steve Scott (Scotty) and Tim Isted will be hosting the UK’s only independent Mac Developer Conference and we have very imaginatively called it MacDev 2009.

Tuesday, 20 January 2009

Zaky argues that Apple’s use of subscription-based accounting for iPhone revenue has significantly hurt its share price — casual investors who are only looking at Apple’s GAAP results don’t realize how much revenue they’ve deferred.

How do you update a cartridge? You can’t. But you can update the games here via the App Store and that’s an automatic process. Not to mention not having to carry around a bucketful of cartridges. You can store as many games as you have space for. Everything about the iPhone suggests where the future’s headed, and I think a lot of the other guys are trying to scramble for what they do in response.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

But designing a typeface is an arduous process requiring serious commitment, and we realized early on that if we weren’t careful, there could suddenly be an endless number of very specialized Gothams. The prospect of a “Gotham for embroidery” collection and a “Gotham for box scores” was daunting, and ran counter to one of H&FJ’s core philosophies: that type families should be as small as possible, but as large as necessary.

Monday, 19 January 2009

Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol.

When looking at the results it gets obvious that there’s a huge difference in performance between a desktop computer and the iPhone. Translating the numbers to a rule of thumb you could say: “What takes one second on a Mac takes one minute on the iPhone”. Or, what sounds even worse to me: “A frame rate of 60Hz on a Mac means one update per second on the iPhone”.

All sorts of good stuff in this NYT/CBS News poll regarding Americans’ expectations regarding Barack Obama, but I like this nugget best:

By contrast, 79 percent were optimistic about the next four years under Mr. Obama, a level of good will for a new chief executive that exceeds that measured for any of the past five incoming presidents. And it cuts across party lines: 58 percent of the respondents who said they voted for Mr. Obama’s opponent in the general election, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said they were optimistic about the country in an Obama administration.

Friday, 16 January 2009

From Peter Burrows’s story for BusinessWeek on the App Store’s 500 millionth download, which includes quotes from several “mobile” developers who are switching to iPhone-only developers:

Indeed, analysts think iPhone sales fell significantly in the fourth quarter from the previous one, when the economy was healthier and consumers were snapping up the brand new iPhone 3G.

My understanding is that these analysts are wrong, and that holiday-quarter iPhone sales were good. How good, exactly, I don’t know, but I would bet heavily against sales having “fallen significantly” quarter-over-quarter. And, if you’re talking about the strength of the App Store market, not just iPhone sales specifically, I’m almost certain that iPod Touch sales were somewhere in the range between outstanding and unfuckingbelievable.

Rob Enderle will not be ignored in the race to say the stupidest possible thing regarding the Steve Jobs medical leave hoopla:

“Steve Jobs is the Ronald McDonald of Apple, he is the face,” said Rob Enderle of Silicon Valley research company Enderle Group. “They either need to redefine the company so his role is divided among different people or they need to find somebody that can clone Steve Jobs.”

So Enderle either (a) believes that McDonald’s was founded by a man named Ronald McDonald; or (b) believes that Jobs’s role at Apple is equivalent to that of a fictional clown.

Professionally, I think we did what we were supposed to do, and let me be clear, I am proud of the work I did with Jesús Diaz on this series.

But then:

THESE STORIES ARE NOT ABOUT TRAFFIC! WE DON’T EVEN GET TRAFFIC BONUSES ANYMORE! Sure this post is tacky, I don’t care. At this very moment, I am very self aware that I’m being a tacky, angry, crazy person. I just can’t listen to another person miss the point of why it’s shitty to cover Steve’s health like we, the press, have.

Writing about a man’s health, trying to figure out if he’s dying or not by talking to third-party expert doctors, checking statistics for Whipple procedure survival rates and timelines, checking in with sources who know people who know people who have heard that he’s dying—they’re all basically indecent things to do.

I want to apologize to everyone who knows Steve, everyone who’s known anyone who’s been sick that’s been covered in the press, and my parents, who are probably ashamed I’m tracking a man’s health so rabidly at work, and raised me to be better than some journalist/vulture dickhead.

Here’s a hint: When you’re actually proud of your work, rather than just telling yourself you’re proud of it, you sleep well at night.

I linked to Adam Lashinsky’s profile of Apple COO Tim Cook for Fortune back in November, but it’s worth another link this week:

One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

My thanks to Hoefler & Frere-Jones, typographers extraordinaire, for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. H&FJ are the makers of some of the world’s best and most popular typefaces, including an enormous number of my own personal favorites. Gotham, Archer, Mercury, Verlag, Knockout — man, I don’t even know where to start. And consider the craftsmanship put into Chronicle Text, which is supplied in four different “grades” for different combinations of ink and paper.

(If you’re using a Mac, you almost certainly already have some of H&FJ’s work on your system. Hoefler Text, an excellent serif text face, has been included with the Mac OS since System 7.5.)

I’m inundated with email from readers telling me that Bloomberg is reporting that Steve Jobs is having his pancreas removed. This is not so.

What Bloomberg has published is idle speculation from doctors who have never even met Jobs, let alone examined him, that maybe he needs to have his pancreas removed, and that if so, the most likely reason would be a recurrence of pancreatic cancer. Not one person in this Bloomberg story claims any familiarity with Jobs, his current condition, or even with Apple. Compare and contrast with yesterday’s Times story, where the two sources were identified as people familiar with the treatment Jobs is currently undergoing, both of whom stated that he is being treated for an inability to absorb nutrients from food, and not for a recurrence of cancer.

Maybe Jobs’s pancreas is doing just fine. Maybe it is riddled with tumors and he’s having it removed right now, as I type this. I don’t know. But neither does Bloomberg, or the doctors they’ve quoted. And yet thanks to their “reporting”, there are now untold thousands of people who now believe it is a fact that his pancreas is being removed.

I can even understand why he doesn’t want to disclose details about his medical problems to the world — it’s very distasteful, and Mr. Jobs also believes strongly that it’s nobody’s business except his and his family’s.

But he’s wrong. There are certain people who simply don’t have the same privacy rights as others, whether they like it or not. Presidents. Celebrities. Sports figures. And, at least in terms of his health, Steve Jobs. His health has become a material fact for Apple shareholders. His vagueness about his health, his dissembling, his constantly changing story line — it is simply not an appropriate way to act when you are the most important person at one of the most high-profile companies in America. On the contrary: it is infuriating.

I disagree with Nocera, but his position represents that of the financial community. Just because Nocera’s “infuriated” by Jobs’s refusal doesn’t mean Jobs doesn’t have the right to privacy.

CNBC’s Jim Goldman, regarding a story he was working on regarding Steve Jobs’s health:

I sent a very personal note to Steve Jobs about this on Monday. I didn’t hear back. I did get a call from someone at Apple asking about what it was I was working on, in relation to these executives and Jobs’s health status. I confided in this person that if they had read my email to Jobs, they knew what I had. I informed Apple that we were going to try to gather more information, but would like to give Apple, and Jobs, a chance to come forward to respond. That was yesterday. I wanted to give it just a little more time. Apple had to be aware that if colleagues this close to Jobs were beginning to emerge from the shadows to speak to me, chances were very good that these sources and others would be talking to others as well.

I’m not saying we forced Apple’s hand, but I’m sure it contributed in some small way to the release tonight, especially since it was merely a week ago when Jobs issued his other release, ending that one tersely, “So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.”

Something sure happened in the last nine days. The gist of Jobs’s January 5 PR was “I’m being treated but I’m not going anywhere.” The gist of his email today was “I’m going away for six months.” I somehow doubt that Goldman is correct that idle speculation from two industry executives who can no longer get Jobs to answer their phone calls or instant messages is it.

The policy requires that at least one editor know the identity of every source. Anonymous sources cannot be used when on-the-record sources are readily available. They must have direct knowledge of the information they are imparting; they cannot use the cloak of anonymity for personal or partisan attack; they cannot be used for trivial comment or to make an unremarkable comment seem more important than it is.

Is this proof that Jobs’s problem is not a recurrence of cancer? No. But if you think The New York Times published the aforelinked paragraph lightly, or didn’t measure every single word of it very carefully, you don’t understand how The New York Times operates.

Wednesday, 14 January 2009

Two people who are familiar with Mr. Jobs’s current medical treatment said he was not suffering from a recurrence of cancer, but a condition that was preventing his body from absorbing food. Doctors have also advised him to cut down on stress, which may be making the problem worse, these people said.

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very
personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over
my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and
my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during
the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more
complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health,
and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary
products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until
the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day
operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management
team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major
strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully
supports this plan.

Apple Inc.’s CEO Steve Jobs says he is taking a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Jobs told employees in an e-mail that his health issues are more complex than he thought. Last week, Jobs announced he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight.

Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, will take over Jobs’ responsibilities while he is on leave.

My last bit of non-Macworld catch-up, I think. If you haven’t seen it yet, Palm’s introduction of the Pre is definitely worth watching. I’m impressed. Palm could be shaping back up into just the rival Apple needs.

I have more to say about the Pre, but the thing that struck me the most about it is that it’s a complete and utter break from all previous Palm software. No compatibility whatsoever — which, given just how decrepit the original Palm OS has become, is exactly what they needed to do. But credit to Palm for having the stones to do it.

The San Jose Mercury News has obtained a Las Vegas Casino profile for Ausaf “Omar” Umar Siddiqui, the former Fry’s Electronics executive who’s in a bit of trouble for embezzling millions to pay for his gambling debts:

When “Mr. S” showed up in Las Vegas, bellboys, butlers and blackjack dealers made sure they were prepared for the high-rolling Fry’s Electronics executive flying in from San Jose with his long list of demands.

Another one from Jason Snell, this time regarding Apple’s legal department sending a complaint to Wired regarding “some articles and videos related to hacking PCs to run Mac OS X”. Wired’s Brian Chen reported on Twitter today that Apple was suing Wired, but he later retracted that — it appears to be a cease-and-desist request.

What apparently raised Apple’s ire was a video by Chen containing explicit step-by-step instructions for installing Mac OS X 10.5 on an MSI Wind notebook. Wired has pulled the video, but Gizmodo is hosting a copy.

The Pre’s big screen: 3.1 inches, with 320 × 480 pixels. That compares to the 3.5-inch iPhone screen, also at 320 × 480. Apple touts the 163 pixels per inch of the display; a Palm PR spokeswoman had no details of the Pre’s ppi number.

Mr. Cox, the Pythagorean Theorem is calling, and it wants to know if you’ve heard of it. You haven’t? … It says you should have learned about it in seventh grade, and it’s all rather simple, you could work it all out on a calculator in about 30 seconds or so… No? Nothing? Not ringing a bell? OK, well, the theorem says the answer is about 186 ppi, give or take a pixel per inch or two, and that it weeps for the state of the American education system.

I think the entire idea of a “replacement” for Steve Jobs is misguided. Let’s just all admit that Jobs is a unique sort of franchise player. He does a lot of things really well. If he were to reduce his role at Apple for whatever reason — I like to imagine that someday he’ll just buy a tropical island like a James Bond villain and retire — he will not be replaced by any one person, but by different people in different roles. Tim Cook appears to be the operations and management guy, the adult supervision. Jonathan Ive has a similar design taste to Jobs. Phil Schiller actually does a pretty good job as a demo guy — I think most tech companies would love having Phil Schiller be their keynote guy. Jonathan Ive is a brilliant designer — I don’t think he needs to be a CEO or good with a clicker on stage in front of thousands of people.

Couldn’t agree more. There is no reason why the CEO has to be Chief Showman.

Tuesday, 13 January 2009

The main thing I’m responsible for is third party application distribution, and although we’re fairly far along in this area, its not too late for your input to count. So let me know what you’d like to see and/or not see. Here are a few questions to get things rolling, in no particular order.

Good questions. I don’t recall seeing anyone from Apple seek feedback from the developer community on a single one of these issues regarding the iTunes App Store.

I have discovered that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to an attack that allows a malicious web site to read files on a user’s hard drive without user intervention. This can be used to gain access to sensitive information stored on the user’s computer, such as emails, passwords, or cookies that could be used to gain access to the user’s accounts on some web sites. The vulnerability has been acknowledged by Apple.

Choose a default RSS reader other than Safari (in Safari’s preferences) and you should be safe.

Update: Mastenbrook has updated his advisory, indicating that you need to do more. Download RCDefaultApp and disable or change the assignments for the “feeds:” and “feedsearch:” URL schemes, too (that’s in addition to the “feed:?” scheme, which is what gets changed when you use Safari’s preference to set the default RSS reader).

New Mac utility from Google: Quick Search Box. Sort of like a cross between Quicksilver and the iPhone Google Search app. The Quicksilver similarities aren’t surprising — one of the Google engineers responsible for Quick Search Box is Quicksilver auteur Nicholas Jitkoff. It’s like a re-thinking of Quicksilver from the ground up, with a lot less fiddliness.

Calling it a “developer preview” seems apt at this point, though — it hung on my machine several times in the hour or so I’ve been trying it. Lots of promise though, including a plugin system that, as far as I can tell, isn’t yet documented anywhere. (Look inside the app bundle and you’ll see that most of its features are implemented as plugins.)

Monday, 12 January 2009

I’m with Tom Krazit on this: I think it’s very unlikely Apple would want anything to do with CES. I think it’s far more likely that these rumors are plants from CES, in an attempt to draw third-party exhibitors from Macworld Expo next year, than that they’re true.

“I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.”

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Friday, 9 January 2009

Hour-long podcast discussing this week’s Expo news and events, hosted by Macworld’s Dan Moren, and featuring John Moltz, Paul Kafasis, and yours truly, recorded right on the show floor Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday, 8 January 2009

So there’s a new full-day session at Macworld this year called Pulse, with a great list of speakers including Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, Craig Hockenberry, Adam Engst, and me. Each talk is just 20 minutes long — short and punchy, one right after another. I go on at 11 am.

(Wish I could link directly to a Macworld Conference page specifically about the Pulse sessions, but I can’t seem to find one.)

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Translation: Bargain hunters are going to be disappointed.

If they’re going to charge a higher price than the iPhone’s, users are going to expect a better phone than the iPhone.

Palm unveiled their next-generation mobile device today at CES: a phone called the Pre running a new WebKit-based software platform they’re calling “WebOS”. The gist, from a software standpoint, is that all the apps are written as client-side web apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Hardware-wise, it’s an iPhone-style touch screen with a hardware keyboard that slides out underneath — but in portrait, not landscape.

No word yet on price, and they don’t expect to ship it until later this year. The biggest technical challenge, I think, is going to be performance. If it’s fast enough, though, this could be good.

The SD Association announced the SDXC (extended capacity) memory card specification, which could drive up the size of Secure Digital Memory cards to 2TB. Initial SD cards released by manufacturers based on the specification will provide storage capacity of 64GB, said Rex Sabio, co-chairman of SDA.

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

With iWork ’09, some of these deficiencies have been remedied. Users still don’t have the unlimited (maybe too extensive?) power of Excel and VBA, but the foundation has been duly laid in both Numbers and Pages ’09, allowing developers and individuals with AppleScript prowess to automate almost any aspect of either application.

Was it a great keynote? Well, no. Phil Schiller actually did a great job delivering it. Has anyone watched CEOs from other companies? They’d be lucky to have their keynotes delivered by Schiller, let alone Jobs. Apple followers are spoiled.

The problem is he just didn’t have that much to announce. But expecting pie-in-sky items like new iPhones and iPods is just jackassery in the third degree.

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Apple realized that people don’t just want to find photos. Go back to iPhoto’s domain: it’s that situation where you have a bunch of photos and you want to look at them and share them. When you’re in that situation, you don’t just want to see random photos. You want to see and share photos of certain things.

Bizarre piece from Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider yesterday, claiming that Gizmodo “got the story right” about Steve Jobs’s health. The report with the headline that read “Steve Jobs’s Health Declining Rapidly”, and included this quote from their “trusted source”:

Steves [sic] health is rapidly declining. Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs letting the hype destroy apple [sic] when the inevitable news comes later this spring.

So Apple issues statements from Jobs and from the board of directors which indicate that the cause of his weight loss has been identified and is being treated and that he expects to be in better shape within a few months — and somehow this proves that Gizmodo was right about a report which stated that his health is “rapidly declining” leading to some dreadful “inevitable news later this spring”? What the fuck.

I predicted iLife, iWork, and the 17-inch MacBook Pro, but, as usual, I predicted a slew of other fanciful things that didn’t pan out. (It occurs to me that if everything I predicted had been included, it would have been a six-hour keynote.)

My thanks to MacHeist for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. There’s something going on at the web site this week where you get a “mission”, solve puzzles, and then you get free software as a reward. You get the outliner Process (regularly $39) for free just for signing up.

Sunday, 4 January 2009

Interesting argument from Sean Devine, that the current App Store balance, which tilts in favor of quantity over quality, works in Apple’s favor:

The KEY to maximizing iPhone profit is to create very high switching costs for users, just as they did for the iPod via the iTunes Music Store. Apple is using the App Store to create switching costs, and they know that if all of their users have “invested” in many little applications that will only work on the iPhone (a la songs from the iTunes Music Store), they will eventually have users locked in to a long-term investment in the iPhone franchise. The profit from the successful execution of the iPhone franchise strategy will dwarf any amount of profit that they could suboptimize if they focused on what was best for the iPhone application development community.

I can see how this might be the case, and the whole essay is worth a read. But, just playing devil’s advocate, I’d say the counter-argument is obvious: there is no stickiness with truly inconsequential apps. Are people really going to be less likely to switch to a phone other than the iPhone just because their fart joke apps won’t run on the new phone? The sweet spot is clearly somewhere between quantity and quality — not just many apps, but many apps that you feel like you can’t do without.

New app from Rogue Amoeba, lets you tune satellite radio from both XM and Sirius. You still need a (paid) account from XM or Sirius, but Pulsar works far better on the desktop than either of XM’s or Sirius’s official, clumsy, web-based clients. Pulsar works great with the XM account I have for my car.

Introductory price is just $15, and, even better, during this introductory period Rogue Amoeba is making Pulsar available for free for anyone with a license to any other Rogue Amoeba product.

Saturday, 3 January 2009

One extreme is that private APIs should never be used, period, full stop. They’re bad, don’t want to touch them, don’t even acknowledge that they exist. The other extreme is that they’re fine and dandy, use them like you’d use anything else.

As with most things, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But where, exactly, and how do you determine if something is worth using?

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Friday, 2 January 2009

In order to unlock a 3G iPhone, you’ll need to upgrade your iPhone to baseband 02.28.00. This is the baseband that ships with the latest 2.2 firmware update from Apple. It’s also the baseband and update that the dev team (and we here at Ars) have been warning you not to upgrade to.

So now it’s Ars Technica policy to recommend that users not upgrade their iPhones until jailbreak experts say so? Great advice.

My thanks to Delicious Monster for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Delicious Library 2, their award-winning tool for cataloging your books, movies, software, toys, tools, electronics, and video games. Sounds dull, I know — who ever says “Let’s go catalog stuff for fun”, right? But just one look at a screenshot and you can see that Delicious Library is, at the very least, not dull. It’s got more of an Apple-style user interface than many of Apple’s own apps.

Delicious Library sells for $40, and you can purchase it, and find out more information, at their web site. Delicious Monster is also exhibiting at next week’s Macworld Expo in booth 2602, where, supposedly, they’re going to have something new to show.

Even two years after I left Apple, I still feel like I celebrate two Christmases: the one I celebrate with my family, and the one in January that we celebrate when Steve Jobs gets up on stage and says: “I have a few things to show you today that I think you’ll really like.”

Thursday, 1 January 2009

I’ve heard that iMovie will largely (if not entirely) be a Web Application and Apple would offer its users to “upload your movies to us and edit them there.”

Sure, iMovie as a web app. Uh-huh. Slogan: And you thought USB was slow.

Weintraub has also reported that the iWork ’09 apps are going to be web apps too. (I like how, when linking to the one and only report of iWork-suite-as-web-apps, which is his own report, that he says the move is “largely believed”.)

There may well be a germ of truth in here — some sort of online web-based document viewing/editing for iWork document formats (tied to MobileMe, perhaps?). But the idea that these top-line iWork and iLife apps are going web-based strikes me as impossible. The whole appeal of the iWork suite is that the user experience is extremely polished; nothing web-based comes even close to the polish of iWork ’08 today. The way Apple stays ahead of the web app trend is by creating native Cocoa experiences that can’t be duplicated in web apps — both on the Mac and iPhone.

New AppleScript book co-authored by long-time AppleScript experts Sal Soghoian and Bill Cheeseman. Soghoian is the AppleScript product manager at Apple, and Cheeseman is the author of the amazing GUI scripting developer tool UI Browser.

In 2009, dismal sales of Net TV set-tops will turn into non-existent sales, no matter how many different ways the products are promoted. So, I predict that Vudu will close its doors in 2009 and Apple’s Steve Jobs will finally call it quits on his least favorite hobby, Apple TV.